Plan Day

The BU Fiscal Year got off to a late start, which I blame wholly on work -- a convenient scapegoat which I also blame for sore wrists and the resurgence of polio in third world countries. Because of this, I didn't get around to making my plan for the year until just this past week. I always have a plan, for a BU without a plan is like a crossword puzzle without a vowel.

Ever since I got out of the perpetual adolescence of higher education, I've tried to create an overarching storyline to my years in the real world. It's against my nature to have long term goals that I could fill in on one of those "Where do you see yourself in five years?" surveys, but looking ahead a year or so gives me the feeling that I know where I'm going, while still enjoying my blissful ignorance in the present day. Here's what I've come up with so far for 2007:

• January: Get the damn HD over-the-air signal working and cancel my Comcast account.


• February: Install laminate flooring in my foyer. Paint and recarpet my home office -- the room where I spend most of my time. Paint and recarpet the upstairs hallway which is currently a patchwork mix of antique white and glossy white paint layered back to 1978.


• March: Paint and recarpet the living room / front stairwell. Paint the kitchen. Finally get around to writing a will. Whoever sucks up the most will get my house.


• April: Install laminate flooring in the kitchen. Redo the upstairs bathrooms. At this point, the entire upstairs floor will be stamped with the look-of-BU and ready for use in entertaining friends and the seduction of nubiles.


• May: Give a Lunchtime Seminar at work. I'm thinking about doing one on the resurgence of television soundtracks, specifically using the music of Michael Giacchino in LOST and Alias. First though, I have to make sure there's enough "interesting-to-laymen" material to fill an hour.


• June - August: This summer I plan on getting a certification or two, or three. Our company just joined some program called Skillsoft that offers online courses in many areas. I can do online courses in my sleep -- this should be a good way to beef up the resumé. If that doesn't pan out, I'll just continue down the Java Certification track and get another one of those. Last week, a coworker came to me "because I was one of the Java go-to guys". I told him that was just because all the others had quit.


• September- October: It will be time to recarpet and repaint the basement romper room and maybe redo the floor in the attached bathroom. Once this is done, every room in the house will have received the BU-treatment and I will be out of house-related projects, ending a three-year odyssey. That is, until something breaks, like the fuse in my heater did last Friday, sending the upstairs rooms into a frigid tailspin of temperate tragedy.


• November: November is the Month of Holiday Dinners. I can't mess with tradition so there will be no other projects this month.


• December: December is either my month off or my month of overtime, depending on the phase of the moon and whether "YEAR mod 2 == 0". So, no projects here either.

Besides these big projects, I also plan on hosting Poker Night twice a month with rotating rosters of rookies, composing regularly, and using the recumbent bike for 30 minutes a day at least five times a week. So far I'm on target, except for last week's Poker Night which most people had to bail on. I think they got scared when they saw I had gotten second place last Tuesday.

What do YOU plan on doing this year? Share with me as a kindergartner shares a Tonka truck.

Happy Birthday Jaood and Chris Booher!